Typically, a large organization, such as a company or corporation, includes several divisions/departments, each of which are working on one or more projects/assignments simultaneously. For example, Department A may be working on Project A, while the employees in Department B may be working on a different project, Project B. Often times, each project is a small aspect of the overall product or service that the organization provides.
Generally, such an organization builds a large volume of resources, skills, and information that can be useful to other employees within the organization that may be located across divisions/departments of the organization. For example, for both newly created projects and ongoing projects within the company, a significant effort on the part of management is made to find resources available to for the project. Such efforts may include setting up meetings with various managers to determine who might be available to start working on a project, finding resources for helping during an ongoing project, arranging dates. Often times, the routine tasks that management performs to obtain resources for a project are time consuming processes that can be costly in terms of set-up time to get a new project running and management man hours. This is largely due to the fact that management often is not aware of the individuals to contact and invite to the first project meeting. Moreover, project staffing typically occurs on a per-department or per-division basis, where projects are staffed by recruiting individuals in a particular department or division of the organization.
To aid management with obtaining resources for projects, organizations typically store project related data in one or more organization-wide repositories that anyone may internally search for information. Such repositories are typically manually populated with resources and/or manually searched to obtain resources and often times do not contain the information desired.